


Retroflection

by mightbeanasshole



Series: The Company We Keep (Fake AH Crew AU) [4]
Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter/Funhaus RPF
Genre: Fake AH Crew, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-19
Updated: 2015-10-19
Packaged: 2018-04-27 04:43:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5034190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mightbeanasshole/pseuds/mightbeanasshole
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>With love, there is always a tipping point. Geoff never tries to understand what theirs was or why.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Retroflection

> _**Retroflection**  of ocean currents occurs when the current turns back on itself. It is believed that this process occurs when the current experiences large changes in potential vorticity due to flow over topography that has large changes in depth or the Coriolis force changes as a current crosses the equator; well-known examples are the Agulhas Current and the North Brazil Current, respectively._
> 
> * * *

 

People have told Michael that he’s pretty when he cries -- that he’s got the most beautiful tears they’ve ever seen.

And until today, he’s never been able to wrap his mind around what it is, exactly, that people find appealing about it.

But as he watches his boss’ visage go strange and then crack, Michael understands.

Maybe there’s something fucked up about the fact that Michael isn’t compelled by the sight to rush to Ramsey and see what’s wrong. And equally fucked up, Michael doesn’t clear his throat or make any other sound to let the man know that he’s being watched. Instead, Michael stills his breath here in the safe house -- with its unfamiliar angles, with its unexpected sight lines -- and he goes stark still as he watches Ramsey -- the man who shoots at cops for sport, the man who knows 50 ways to lay a blade that can get someone to give up their own grandmother, the man who razed a city block when someone had muttered something rude about Jack under their breath -- … as he watches Ramsey begin to cry.

Michael and his boys had never made it this big, had never pulled off a heist with as many moving parts as this one. With a cargobob and contingency plans, with a real medic and an endgame that had them scattered across two different mainland safehouses and an island base. The three-boy crew had mainlined adrenaline enough for Michael to know that violence and mayhem and raw fear and elation could do strange things to you as you came off of it.

And this heist -- their first as the Fake AH Crew -- has Michael’s head feeling several orders of magnitude too large for his own body. Maybe Ramsey feels the same way.

In the end, he doesn’t know why Ramsey is crying. But he can’t look away.

And those people who tell Michael that he cries the most beautiful tears they’ve ever seen… they only say it because they’ve never seen Ramsey cry, Michael thinks.

It’s expected from Michael, isn’t it?

The firebrand, the agitator. The man who looks like a kid and calls himself a boy and flings himself into friendships and laughter and danger as easily as he lobs jury-rigged grenades at blockades. Michael _does_ cry easily -- cries from stress, cries from pleasure, cries from exhaustion or sadness or anger. If you’re ashamed of a thing, it means it’s a weakness -- and so Michael has never been ashamed of it.

Maybe that’s why it has invited comment so often.

But Ramsey is a man Michael had never expected to see cry -- and so the phenomenon stops Michael. And as he spies on his boss in the silent safe house, as he watches the man tucked into the crotch of an odd and outdated sectional sofa, looking suddenly very small out of his suit, without a bottle of bourbon in his hand or a cigar, without a sneer as a shield, without Ryan and Jack running interference, Michael has the sense that he’s seeing something he should not.

Michael will not look away.

Ramsey’s eyes are fixed at some point -- the mantlepiece, maybe -- and even before the tears come, Michael knows what the expression on the man’s face means. The chin gone funny, eyelids fluttering, skin red and strange and not quite a blush or the flush that comes with anger.

And all at once it builds and amplifies and four tears break loose and roll down the man’s face, slowing at the stubble on his cheeks -- and then his breathing follows, immediately off-kilter, immediately ragged, and Ramsey hunches a little but does not, as Michael fears, cover his face with his tattooed hands. His gaze stays steady on the mantle.

Michael has wanted Ramsey for months -- has avoided it, has wrested himself away from it, has successfully compartmentalized it to the point that he didn’t feel worried about agreeing to share the safe house with Ramsey alone for two nights as Los Santos cooled off after this first big score. He’d walked away from being pushed up against the wall by the object of his desires when they were alone, shrugged off the growled promises, the half-beg half-demand that Michael give into it -- he’d walked away with a smirk and cum hot over his own hands and moved on from it without giving into a situation that would compromise them both, without letting the thought linger or bubble up unbidden or intrude into reality.

But the want is here upon Michael again, as abrupt as Ramsey’s tears -- amplified to a fever pitch from the adrenaline of the job and the aftermath of that adrenaline on Michael’s system.

He vibrates with it like a tuning fork as he stands there, silent and unseen in the doorway.

Ramsey is weeping now, the crying hitting its stride, taking on a rhythm and a timbre -- and this is unfamiliar territory to Michael. Yes, Michael lets tears drop frequently. But what he’s watching now is more than just a casual flirtation with tears. Ramsey is fully committed -- his _body_  is committed -- and he wraps himself in dark-patterned arms as he sobs now.

Some deep piece of Michael’s reality is eroded by the sight -- as if some tenant of truth has been disproved. As if a great river has suddenly stilled and now flows backwards.

There had been glimpses of things that made Michael wonder if he _could_ ever know Ramsey the way that Jack knows him. If he could, Michael had always reasoned, then maybe it would not be such a mistake to fall into bed with the man -- despite the warning signs that seemed to blink like neon around Ramsey.

A lion tamer emerges from the cage every day because she knows enough about the lion to keep her life -- not because of some great bravery or innate quality. She lives because she can read the danger in the coiling of the lion’s muscles, because she can feel the half-second before the second that the lion decides that she is prey.

Michael needed to know more, then, before he would enter that cage.  

Each small glimpse beyond what Ramsey painted for the world, however, had come with a glare short behind it, with a slammed door or a story truncated the moment he realized Michael was in earshot. Even as Ramsey tried to convince Michael to share his bed with intimidation, with gifts, he’d been tight-fisted with the type of _knowledge_ that would’ve persuaded Michael to do so.

But something changes in Michael now, and he finds himself sucked towards the swell, a victim to an impossibly shifting current.

\---

Geoff lets it come. He lets it wreck him in the safety of the den. He feels like a child -- and that’s just fine. Sobs roll through his body -- and if Jones weren’t in the safe house with him, Geoff would let himself howl and let himself wail. Instead he keeps it as quiet as he can as he lets the sobs take him.

It’s the only catharsis he knows. And this is the worst that he’s needed it.

It hadn’t always been bad like this. People died. Crime was war. But then Jack. And then Ryan. They were close -- and if they died ( _when_ they died, Geoff often assured himself) they wouldn’t be the type of collateral damage that would allow Geoff to continue to sleep at night.

It was a complicated game of cognitive dissonance, then: planning the jobs that would put them in harm’s way. Executing those plans and holding all of that part of himself up in the air and away from his line of sight, shaping a reality for himself that was bearable until each job was over and he was someplace safe and someplace quiet where he could finally lower the truth back into view and fall apart from the fear and the guilt.

And in one deal he had doubled that juggle.

Because the new kids weren’t grunts, weren’t replaceable. Geoff knew that before he sent them into the heist -- but even as he got older and softer, he got better at pretending that he had nothing inside.

He’s gotten so good at it that he doesn’t know how to turn it off now. That there are times when Jack lays a hand across Geoff’s hand and asks what the matter is and Geoff knows that there’s _nothing_ that’s the matter -- and Geoff is left wondering why he’d been scowling, why he’d fixed his jaw that way, why he simply presented himself as… _flat_.

But it all cracks here. The heist was fine -- they were safe, all of them, the new crew and the old. And so many things flow through Geoff as he lets himself sob that he stops trying to sort through them all -- the adrenaline tapering off and leaving him shaking.

He will work his way into a bourbon bottle soon enough. But he needs to let this wrack his body until he’s dry and his head pounds and reality is no longer a goddamn myth that he makes up in his mind but is something real that he can touch with his hands.

There is a point between breaths when he knows Jones is in the room and there is nothing Geoff can do to change anything about the scene now. Jones has probably been watching from the beginning -- has seen him rock and cradle his own body like a child -- and Geoff is washed with shame.

He expects anger but none comes. Geoff is still relieved that they are all whole and sound and unharmed, and if Jones is fascinated by the sight of his boss falling apart then so be it. Geoff doubts the kid has any respect for him at this point anyway -- not after Geoff has pushed himself onto Jones more times than he can count, at times sober and but more often than not drunk --  all receiving the same smirk, the same dismissal. And he couldn’t bring himself to hate Jones for it, either. So let him watch the show.

Geoff expects Jones to take his fill of the scene and then hide.

Jones does not.

He steps instead into the room.

“Ramsey --” he says gently, as if just to let Geoff know that he’s in the room. In case he’d like to get a handle on himself, maybe. Geoff doesn’t -- couldn’t now if he wanted to -- and he sucks a ragged breath into a burning chest and just nods -- _yes, you are there_.

Geoff fixes his eyes to the same spot until he can’t any more, until Jones is pushing his way into Geoff’s vision, pushing his way -- Geoff realizes -- into his lap. Geoff lets his body unfurl and doesn’t try to understand any piece of what’s happening.

Jones has changed out of his bloody leather jacket, taken out his contact lenses -- and in wire-framed glasses and a hoodie, he looks more like a high schooler leaving an intramural basketball game than a demolitions expert that had just made the crew several million dollars richer (and reduced LSPD’s ranks -- by Geoff’s estimation -- by a baker’s dozen).

He still smells like fire, though. Scorched earth.

Geoff doesn’t ask what Jones wants or what he’s doing. He accepts Michael’s weight on top of him like a gift. He accepts the hand that reaches up to thumb away a fresh tear. His diaphragm spasms through one last shuddering breath as Geoff accepts the steady gaze and the tight smile from Jones that looks out of place on a searching, mournful face.

Geoff accepts the eyelids fluttering closed, the mouth opened and sweeter than Geoff had imagined. He accepts the body that yields to him as his breath slows and the two of them begin to move together in an unfamiliar bed. He accepts the ghosts of sobs that still pluck at Geoff’s chest as it’s Michael’s turn to cry fat tears, to shudder and breathe.

Geoff accepts the flow of the next 48 hours -- never questions what has changed, what he’s done, why Jones comes to him that night.

Geoff does not ask why it doesn’t end when they leave the safe house, either -- just as he does not ask himself when he started to love Jones or how it had happened or when he’d been able to fix the word “love” against the kid and know that it’s an absolute truth. He does not ask, when he says the word too early to be safe or sane, why Michael does not shy away then. Geoff accepts that Michael is a gift he doesn’t deserve and he never asks himself why -- holds the question up and out of sight -- because Geoff isn’t sure he wants to know the answer.

 

 


End file.
